Thursday, August 30, 2012

At the Get Booked Booth at Las Vegas Pride! THIS Saturday, September 8, 2012, 5:00pm until 6:30pm

500 S. Grand Central Parkway, Las Vegas, NV. ManLove Press authors James Buchannan, the insanely handsome J.P. Bowie, and the Sauveur sophisticated Marshall Thornton will read from their work and sign books at the Get Booked Booth at Las Vegas Pride on Saturday, September 8, 2012 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm.

A FREE Shuttle will run throughout the day of the festival between the Gold Parking Lot at the World Market Center and the PRIDE Festival Main Entrance at the Clark County Government Center.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

As I mentioned in June, I quit ye olde teaching job in favor
of not being beat up and getting to write stories of cute guys fucking all day.
Props to me. But as Labor Day stares me in the face, I'm getting an odd feeling
of being out of time and place. Labor Day has meant the start of a new year to
me for a tidy few decades, much more so than January 1. Fall has always been
new beginnings, new chances, new clothes and new school supplies. At The Most
Awesome Job Ever, all Labor Day means this year is that a book came out, a book
is in edits, I have print galleys due and another book due while a trying to
keep new characters from trying to escape and take over. All of that is fun
(except the print galleys), but they don't have that special connection to this
time of year. Still not complaining because, see above, getting to write about
guys meeting, fucking and falling in love is absolutely The Most Awesome Job
Ever, but it's hard fighting the urge to buy new clothes or a pencil case.

We humans have been coming up with ways to tell time
(Stonehenge, New Grange) almost as soon as we could count, so it seems like a
pretty basic need to find a rhythm in the cycle of the year. That led me to
thinking about finding a similar rhythm in my writing schedule. Does it matter
when a book comes out? It seems to me that my books that release in March/April
or December/January seem to sell best. May/June is okay. The slowest month for
me for new releases seems to be August. Anyone have thoughts on that? Should I
beg, borrow and steal to get books to come out December, April...and a month
not August to get into a pattern? And how often is good for releases? Every
four months? Every six? At what point do readers say, "I forgot she was
still writing"?

I may not have semesters to
tick off the time for me anymore, but as long as I have the rhythm of write,
edit, release, I think I'll be happy living off the clock.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

When you write fantasy, one of the most important elements of your universe is reality. ... Wait, what? Let me put it this way: For a fantastical universe to be believable, it must be grounded in real world facts, even if the facts don't play a direct part in the story itself. Where is all this leading, you might ask? Well, I'm working on the origin story for Rhys and Isaac from my short story Play Music, Play Magic. Isaac is a fisherman so what d'you think I'm doing lately? Researching long line fishing practices. I'm also digging up date on storms at sea. (It's been so long since I read A Perfect Storm, there's none of it left in my memory.) I'm guesstimating that about 10% of what I learn will play directly into the story, but that's okay. You don't have to see the roots to enjoy the tree, right? Hmm...I should have a nautical analogy. Let me think... I got nothin'. Better do some more research. ;-)

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Happy Sunday, Slashers! Here we are at the tail end of August and I'm left once again wondering where the summer has gone. That one commercial where the dad is gleefully throwing school supplies into the cart while the kids try to set him on fire with their eyes makes me laugh. And not because of the dad, it's totally because of the kids. They're the ones I'm identifying with.
Every year when summer ends, I make a promise to myself to try and read more during the fall and winter months. Usually this promise falls by the wayside in favor of staring at the television, but not this year. I have an iPad, which will make it exceptionally easy to finish one book and download another one immediately. So that's my back to school resolution. (Another one is to stop buying every pair of cute fuzzy pajamas I see.)
In athletically related news, I finished my first draft of Morgan's story from Tinder, so now I can concentrate on training this week for the Disneyland Half Marathon next Sunday. Let's hope edits don't come back until after I cross the finish line.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

I'll be reading and signing books along with ManLovePress authors, J.P. Bowie, and
Marshall Thornton at Get Booked on
Saturday, September 8, 2012 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm. Get Booked is located at 4640
South Paradise Road, #15, Las Vegas, NV 89169.

ManLove Press authors James Buchanan, J.P. Bowie, and
Marshall Thornton will read from their work and sign books at Get Booked on
Saturday, September 8, 2012 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm. Get Booked is located at 4640 South Paradise Road, #15, Las Vegas, NV 89169.

James Buchanan, lawyer by day and the author of the beloved
Taking the Odds Series, the Deputy Joe Novels as well as many stand alone
books, lives in a 100 year old Craftsman Home in Pasadena with SexyGuy, two
demon spawn and a herd of adopted animals. Between trying cases, raising kids
and writing books, James has spoken and read at conferences such as Saints
& Sinners, the Popular Culture Association and the CARAS Alternate
Sexualities Conference. James’ Hard Fall (Honorable Mention 2010) and All or
Nothing (Finalist 2011) were both honored by the National Leather
Association-International’s Pauline Réage Novel Awards, recognizing positive
portrayals of the Leather Lifestyle in fiction.

In the midst of midlife crisis, James bought and learned to ride a Harley - it
went with the big, extended-cab pickup in the driveway. A member of CorpGoth
since 1993, James has been known to wear leather frock coats to court. If you
don't find James at the computer working on the next book, you probably won't
find the bike in the garage.

J.P. Bowie is
the author of more than fifty novels and short stories in mixed genres of
mystery, cowboys, vampires, historical and contemporary, all about gay romance.
Originally from Scotland, he has lived in the States for many years, and was
Head of Wardrobe for master magicians Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage, Las Vegas.
He currently lives in Henderson with his partner of eighteen years.

Marshall Thornton is an award-winning novelist, playwright and
screenwriter living in Long Beach, California. He is best known for the Boystown
detective series, which was a finalist in the 2011 Lambda Awards and received
an honorable mention in the 2011 Rainbow Awards. Other novels include the
erotic comedy The Perils of Praline, or the Amorous Adventures of a Southern Gentleman
in Hollywood, Desert Run and Full
Release. Marshall has an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, where he
received the Carl David Memorial Fellowship and an honorable mention in the
Samuel Goldwyn Writing awards.

Get Booked is
Las Vegas’ premiere GLBT retailer serving the community for more than eighteen years.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

A painful (and sometimes funny) thing about writing is that it often involves stabbing your imaginary friends in the back, often just when you’ve let them find a moment or two of happiness. Ending a scene in a book on a happy sigh does not inspire a reader to turn to the next chapter. It inspires them to put it down and go to sleep and dream happy, porny things. (Oh, is that just me? Carry on then.)

The fact is, happiness is boring. Even happy couples spar. People often ask me to write more of Joey and Aaron. (Below I have a link to a free short story to whet your appetite for But My Boyfriend Is which will be out next Tuesday, August 21.) The thing is, in order to write a whole novel about them, I’d have to give them a novel worth of conflict, something that couldn’t be resolved with a talking and sex. I’d have to really stab them hard, in the heart. Make them hurt. Break them up.

If I don’t at some point in my book say, “Oh shit, I’ve just totally fucked this up. I can’t fix this for them. I’m not sure it’s ever going to work out!”, how can I keep a reader wondering the same thing. How can I convince you that there’s a reason to stay up and read the next chapter before the aforementioned dreams?

I’ve done horrible things to unsuspecting characters, and in But My Boyfriend Is (which HEY, is available for preorder at Samhain or Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever you like to buy ebooks) I did some pretty mean stabbing. I kicked my characters when they were down, ripped away what they’d always counted on, what they thought they could trust. This being an author thing puts blood on your hands. Sometimes more than figuratively. But you’ll have to read But My Boyfriend Is to find out what I mean.

FREE short featuring Joey and Aaron from Collision Course. It ends just as But My Boyfriend Is starts. (Hey, don't say I never gave you anything. *winks* It's not even my birthday.)

Friday, August 10, 2012

As I said
on my blog a few days ago, I’ve recently had the urge to write about Vadim
Krasnorada’s son, Nikolai. Vadim Krasnorada being one of the two main
characters is Special Forces, the
work I’m probably best-known for. I’m using the expression “cult classic” with
a fair amount of self-irony, though I keep seeing people calling it that.

I know I’d
threatened writing about Nikolai before, but this time it actually happened.
What intrigues me about him is that he’s a sane Krasnorada. I like misfits in
my own writing, but in this case, it’s the one normal guy who sticks out. I
mean, his sister Anya is as cold-blooded and precise as Vadim was roughly aged
thirty—we’re talking special forces soldier-level lethality. Only, of course,
she’s an emergency surgeon, and, in Nikolai’s words “a man-hating lesbian”
(which doesn’t do her justice, by a long shot, but our families always know
best how to hurt us).

And then
his mother, Katya, former Russian Olympic medallist in fencing, who is as surgical
and strong as her daughter. Both these women are so hardcore that they make an
older, wiser Vadim look . . . well, old and wise.

As at the
time of writing, Gold Digger (working
title) is 40k and it’s single-POV. All from Nikolai’s perspective, though he’s
a good observer overall. I expect to add a few thousand words to that, but I
reckon it’s going to stay a longish novella and it wraps up some open questions
about Vadim and some of my characters in Special
Forces.

Now, Special Forces was written from early
2006 to late 2008—two and a half years for one million words. The enormous
pressure that project generated very nearly burned me out of writing in
mid-2008; and it killed a number of very good ideas for novels. This online
serial became much larger than ever anticipated, much larger than I ever
wanted. In some ways, writing the story in the last roughly 12 months of that
period was a traumatic experience, and I believe it shows in the rifts inside
the story. I still struggle to edit the text to a decent standard (I’d much
rather write new stuff than revisit an old mess). For years, the experience has
put me completely off the idea of writing another series. After being the
hostage of a mammoth project like that (which would amount to ten big
paperbacks) for so long, I desperately needed a change.

On the
other hand, all that writing in English helped me make the transition from
writing in German to writing in English, and it kept me going through a couple
boring, repetitive jobs, and I met some terrific readers through the work. So
it’s not all bad. Some of it was even pretty damn nice.

But the
character, Vadim, was still in my head. I dealt with him for a long, long time,
and I resurrected him—a more innocent, idealistic version—in 2010/2011 in Dark Edge of Honor, where he’s clearlySergei Stolkov.

True to the
statement that a good story is like an iceberg—90% will never make it to the
surface (or onto paper), there’s a great deal more in Special Forces and in its cast of characters, things that only I
know. I know a great deal more about Solange and Jean, for example, and once I
feel comfortable writing a romance between a male-to-female transsexual and a
philandering bisexual in denial, I might tackle their story. I still think a
story about a young Jean could be terrific fun, although people loathe that
character. It could be fun to attempt to turn the loathing around. I don’t
think he deserves all the bad rep he’s getting.

When I was
looking at writing Gold Digger as a
spin-off to Special Forces, there
were a few questions I had to answer:

1)How
strongly is this connected to Special
Forces? Or, in other words: Can this stand alone?

2)Special Forces being free on the internet, will
readers be willing to pay for Gold Digger?

3)Can
I believably avoid characters that I don’t own without the text becoming
awkward and the characters unnatural?

I had to
answer these questions for myself before launching in earnest into a project
that would tie me up for a month or two. With so many projects on the go,
deciding what I want to focus on is a fine art, and, for example, “free
fiction” takes a backseat by sheer necessity.

So, yes,
the idea is that it can stand alone as the contemporary romance of a guy who
has big family issues and somewhat weird father. Nikolai had maybe two or three
short scenes in Special Forces, so,
while established, he’s not really part of the central cast. He’s a natural
crossover character.

As it does
stand alone and I’m not mentioning any characters I don’t have rights to,
making this a commercial story is legally possible. In addition, I want to have it commercially put out,
because while my self-editing is decent, I do need a good editor who really
tears into my stories. Good editors don’t work for free. I also need a layouter
and a cover artist so it looks like something people would want to read.

Teaming up
with Riptide Publishing makes sense, because my experiences there have been
extremely good. It also means I don’t have to handle all these production steps
by myself. I’d much rather write the next thing. Obviously, the hope is that
it’ll appeal to my non-SF readers enough that they’ll buy it, and that the SF
readers are OK to pay for the end product. It might be a gamble, but I’m pretty
positive. My readers are awesome like that.

The last
bit—writing around characters I don’t own—wasn’t actually hard. Vadim is
incredibly self-contained, as we know from Special Forces. I feel he’s doing
all right where he is now, and Nikolai doesn’t have strong relationships to
anybody I don’t have the rights to. The only tweak was his younger sister, but
she would have been superfluous for the core themes in Gold Digger, so her absence doesn’t even register.

While
writing Gold Digger, I’m re-visiting
the series that devoured my life (and sanity) for 2-3 years, referencing the
text to make sure there are no major inconsistencies. I’m even starting to
slowly retrench from my “series – never again!” Just as I’m writing this, I’m
making preparations to write three more books in the world of Scorpion.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Thank you for your feedback last month, dear Readers. I
truly appreciated the feedback. I’ve learned that you guys and gals like to see
the same kind of things that I do, and luckily for me, the same kinds of things
I like to write in my blog, even though that blog is sadly lacking since I
haven’t written much fiction this year, let alone blog posts.

Let’s make that a new resolution.

While I’m still plugging away at the resolution I made back
in June(to write more often) it is slow going without much new to share.
However, this is an important topic I’ve been meaning to work into my schedule
for several months now.

Stay tuned over at my regular blog (piaveleno.com) for a formal announcement
with more details on the fun ideas I have brewing for this resolution. You’re
all welcome to hold me to this too. Sometimes I do need to be nagged. You see,
I write to-do lists, and then forget that I wrote them, so call me out if I
fail to follow up on this one.

As for that June resolution, I did finish the Goodreads.com
writing event story, and it is posted in that group for those of you who are
members. I’ll eventually post it free on Smashwords and ARe too, but no
promises on when just yet since I’m very slow and inept at creating cover art.

Maybe you wonderful Readers can help me out again. Do you know
of an aspiring cover artist willing to work for free books? Send him or her my
way with piathewriter@gmail.com